Is that a weird thing to say? Reading is probably a normal thing to some of you. And also something a lot more of you should do. Me included.
Reading “books” is something I’ve always wanted to get into.
I’m always saying I want to get into this game or that game, but this is different. I fundamentally like gaming, but for the longest time, I didn’t really “get” reading. Even now, I’m not sure I do.
I can only think of 4 books that I’ve read of my own accord (i.e. not for school) in my entire life. Dune, Your Name, Bruce Campbell’s autobiography, and Bruce Campbell’s autobiographical novel. I don’t know many readers, but I feel comfortable saying that’s the most out-there collection of books anyone’s ever read in the history of ever. I’m sure I’ve read a couple more here and there, but there’s none that come to mind. Instead of going back and editing this paragraph, I’ll just write when they come to mind. Apologies for future derailment.
I don’t know why I’ve never been a reader. From what my parents tell me, I learned to read at a younger age than most, but I didn’t carry that very far into my childhood. The earliest non-kids book I remember coming across was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone or whatever. I don’t remember if that’s the first book or not. I guess that fact shows that I didn’t get very far in it, if I even read a single page. I was more interested in playing Sonic Adventure DX.
And that’s where I settled as a young one. Life dealt the cards it did and I became a gamer instead of a reader. Gaming has been my main hobby since then. Although I have watched my fair share of TV shows and movies when I’m in a mood to be more passive with my media consumption. But I never branched out to reading.
Well, I guess I do have those 4 books I mentioned above. But after a bit of reflection, I realized I read all 4 of those books because of a piece of media from another medium.
I dived into Bruce Campbell’s writing, because I was fascinated with him as a personality. I was really into Evil Dead for a couple of my teenage years, and I spent a lot of time looking into the behind-the-scenes of the movies, listening to director’s commentary, and hell, even exploring the other work of the star of the movie, Bruce Campbell. I watched the show Burn Notice, which featured him as a reoccurring side character. Ended up loving the show, even the parts without him. When looking more into him, I found out he had written a couple of books. His autobiography featured even more juicy behind-the-scenes details of the Evil Dead series, which is pretty much why I was reading in the first place. His autobiographical novel was more of him flexing his creative writing muscles than recounting factual events, but it was still enjoyable because he’s a funny guy. This was in 2014 or so.
Skipping ahead to 2017 (holy cannoli I didn’t realize this was only a 3 year gap I’m getting old send hel-), I read Your Name. It’s is a book I read solely because it just had a movie adaptation and it got really good reviews. I was kinda new to anime at the time (I still am admittedly) and was looking to branch out from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, which was the only anime I had seen back then. After looking into the movie a bit, I learned it was based on a light novel. It was at this point I decided I wanted to be that guy. I wanted to be the guy who could say, “You know, I read the book first. It’s actually much better than the movie.” I wanted the experience of knowing the source material before seeing it’s adaptation, for at least just once in my life.
I really loved the book. It was definitely a genre that I never thought I’d…
Okay hold the phone.
I just went to the wikipedia page to see what actual genre it’s labeled as, because I’m not really sure how to describe it myself. But I go on the fuckin page and read this:
Your Name (Japanese: 君の名は。, Hepburn: Kimi no Na wa.) is a Japanese light novel written by Makoto Shinkai. It is a novelization of the animated film of the same name, which was directed by Shinkai. It was published in Japan by Kadokawa on June 18, 2016, a month prior to the film premiere.
It’s a novelization of the movie. The movie came first. The book was an adaptation of the movie.
I can’t believe it’s taken me over 4 years to learn this bit of knowledge. The whole fuckin reason I read the book was because I thought the movie was based on it. I’ve never had an urge to read a novelization of a movie I love, because I thought that there’d always be something lost in translation when you convert a story that is built with certain visuals and audio effects in mind to a purely written medium.
But I never even noticed. I guess that speaks to the quality of both the book and the movie, that neither really felt better to me. It has been a while, so I might have forgotten any particular parts that I didn’t like, but I can’t think of a reason I liked the book over the movie or the movie over the book story-wise. The music definitely played a huge part in why I liked the movie, but that’s kind of an unfair comparison considering that novels can’t have soundtracks.
…
I’m still thinking about how I made it this long not knowing that the book is actually the adaptation. It’s a small thing admittedly, but it got me shook for a minute or so.
I’m gonna move on now, I don’t have much more to say about Your Name. Both the book and the movie are fantastic and I’m still glad I read it before seeing the film. I like having to visualize characters and settings myself, then comparing my vision with the filmmaker’s vision.
And that perfectly leads us into my final book I’ve read. Or more accurately, what I’m currently reading. Dune.
I’ll take a step back and say that I hate being late to the party when it comes to a certain piece of media exploding in popularity. I like to be on the side of the long-time fans when something they’ve loved for years finally gets a big-budget movie or video game adaptation. They get to appreciate all the new fans and see people go crazy over stuff that made them crazy when they first experienced it.
Dune is something I’ve wanted to read for a couple years. But it’s hard for me to remember if I wanted to read it before I knew there was a movie being made. I remember seeing reports that Denis Villeneuve was going to direct this before Blade Runner 2049 came out and that was back in 2017. I think I can safely say Dune was on my radar back then, but learning that Villeneuve was directing really got me interested in it.
Skip forward 4 years to a month ago and the release date of October 1st is quickly approaching. I realized it was do-or-die with just over a month to read a 600 page book.
This was an extremely daunting challenge I had ahead of me.
I think the longest book I’ve read was Bruce Campbell’s autobiography coming in just short of 400 pages. I guess 200 more pages isn’t that far off, but it had been a while since I even read that. I made my way all through university without reading a single book of my own accord. And the only book I actually enjoyed that I had to read for a class was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Interestingly enough, reading that book got me interested in watching Blade Runner, the film adaptation of the book. Around that time, Blade Runner 2049 was coming out and it was directed by Denis Villeneuve. I loved the movie so much that I went back to watch his older movies and I became a fan of his. Literally the next film he started work on was Dune. Coincidence?
…
Probably.
Anyway, I’ve never read a book this long and it was kinda scary. In addition to that, I had built up this mental perception that sci-fi books are hard to read. I’ve started probably half a dozen critically acclaimed sci-fi novels over the past 5 years or so, and I always fell off because there were just so many damn things to remember.
Character names, planet names, universe-specific technology, flowerly language, it was a lot to take in as someone who hasn’t done a lot of recreational reading in their life.
Your Name was a lot easier for me because it took place on Earth, there wasn’t any weird concepts or technology that had to be explained. It was just two kids having a weird paranormal experience in Japan.
But I decided to bite the bullet and at least give Dune a shot. Because I knew I had to see this movie in theaters. The last movie I saw in theaters was Sonic the damn Hedgehog. I need a good theater experience again and this is my chance.
I mentioned earlier that I’m currently reading it, but I’m almost done actually! I’m 431 pages in out of 617 as of writing. By the time I post whatever this is, I’ll probably be in the 500s.
I think I definitely got in my own head a little bit building up expectations that this was gonna be a “hard” book for someone “like” “me”. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a metric fuckton of characters, planets, technology, concepts, religions, and politics to follow. No doubt some stuff has gone over my head. But the important part is that I’m following along most of the time.
I did get frustrated at myself for not being able to parse why one character was mad at another in one particular scene though.
I’m not sure why I occasionally had stuff go over my head like that. All the stuff I need to understand what’s happening is on the page in front of me, why was I confused? I’m kinda itching to write a piece about that…
Anyway, Dune is great. And this is coming from someone who’s hasn’t done a lot of recreational reading in their life. So if you’re in that position, but you think the synopsis is interesting, I’d say go for it.
I just noticed that I italicized book titles sometimes and didn’t other times. You’re just gonna have to deal with that, I’m too lazy to go back and fix all that. Email me a 1000 word essay and I’ll consider fixing it.
I’m not sure what it says about me; that my main motivation to read has always been spurred from other mediums. I guess I have my mediums that I’m more comfortable in (video games and movies) and mediums that I’m less comfortable in (books and music). There’s nothing wrong with sticking to one or two domains.
So like I said in the beginning, I’d love to read more. I have a huge collection of novels, comics, and manga in the other room, I could keep myself busy for a year. But at the end of the day, I’d prefer to play some Bloons TD 6.
I could try and spin all kinds of stories about exactly why I prefer video games over reading, but I’d just be making shit up. I’m tempted to say interactivity is the reason, but I can’t truly say that’s why. The boring reality is that it’s probably just because I played more video games when I was a kid. Doing homing attacks in Sonic Adventure was cooler than staring at a page, at least in my eyes.
So that’s why reading is weird to me.
I’m just not used to it. Hell, I’d be willing to say that more people in the US aren’t used to reading than people that are. People just don’t read anymore. Fortunately, I’m not one of those people anymore! I just read a novel! Just because I could! I guess the downside is that now I have to keep track of what books I want to read in addition to what movies I want to see, what TV shows I want to see, and what games I want to play… Maybe don’t get into reading if you have a huge backlog of other media.
…
I just remembered, I read Ready Player One as well.
I’m sorry.